Apparently, the rescue world has become so weird that even if you find a stray dog, do your due diligence to locate the owner with flyers, contacts, internet postings, etc. and cannot; foster the dog under your care without compensation, and interview and vet multiple adopters in an effort to find this stray dog a home, it’s still sickening because dog rehoming can only be done by “reputable rescue shelters”.

Sentiment keeps skewing to where the only people who have moral permission to interact with dogs are shelters and rescues, even to the point of those entities breeding dogs despite continuing narrative of pet overpopulation.

I have found, fostered, and adopted out four strays in the past three years, all after two weeks of advertising widely to find their owners without response. The effort to find a lost dog has to be reciprocal, and people who really want their dogs back make very, very certain to look very, very hard for them.

Those dedicated folks in rescue that I know and love desperately want to keep dogs OUT of the rescue and shelter system. Rescues are often full to the brim with a waiting list to take dogs on, and shelters move so much volume that they can’t vet adopters and often have to put dogs without an immediate adoption down. I have people contacting me constantly as a trainer to take dogs that need to be rehomed – and I do my best to teach them how to foster, screen, and adopt dogs themselves.

Because keeping a dog out of the shelter and moving them to a new home is best done by the individual, not by an overtaxed – if “official”- system.